“Big family, that's all the matter with me,” he told me cheerfully. “I want you to come up to dinner if you can and meet my brood. So you've been up to see our David! How is he to-day!”
“Mack,” I said, “can't something be done! Can't someone here start something! I know how a place gets in a rut—how we forget the things we have with us day by day. If you could go away, as I went, and come back to see our David as he is now, poor, discarded, neglected—”
“Rose, what do you mean, neglecting our David!” Mack asked, almost gayly.
Rose smiled sadly.
“Well, I'll tell you,” Mack said, reaching for an envelope on his desk. “Our church is changed. Most of the old people are gone now. I felt the way you did about it—it was a pity our David wasn't a horse instead of a man; then we could have shot him when we had worn him out and were through with him. Folks forget things, don't they! Well—”
He drew a letter from the envelope and passed it to me.
When I had read the letter I was not quite as ashamed of my kind as I had been a moment before. The letter did not promise much. It seemed there was not a great deal of money available and the calls were many, but, after all, there was a Fund and it could spare something for David, as much, perhaps, as a child could earn picking berries in a season each year. But it would mean all the difference between penury and dread of the poorhouse on the one hand and safety on the other to David. I thought how glad David would be and how grateful. I handed the letter to Rose Hinch.
She read it in silence and when she looked up there were tears in her eyes.
“I am so glad—for 'Thusia,” she said. “She has worried so for fear David might have to go to the poorhouse—alone! She has been afraid to die; David would have been so lonely in the poor-house.”
“Well, it is great anyway!” said Mack more noisily than necessary. “So come up to the house to dinner. You, too, Rose. We'll give our dominie the letter. We'll have him come to dinner, too, and Alice, and we'll celebrate—”